


can't help but be out of reach

by ferryboatpeak



Category: Harry Styles (Musician), One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Marching Band, Boys Kissing, Corn - Freeform, Drumline - Freeform, Haircuts, Harry Styles' White Eskimo Band, Long-Distance Relationship, M/M, Total Navajo, everyone's american, interstate highways, school buses, the midwest, the potatoes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-23
Updated: 2017-08-23
Packaged: 2018-12-18 17:52:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11879718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ferryboatpeak/pseuds/ferryboatpeak
Summary: Mitch offers up gas money and he’s got himself a ride home for the weekend, just that easy. Seems meant to be, so he doesn’t waste any time thinking about whether it’s a good idea.





	can't help but be out of reach

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, I wrote a 6K marching band au about Mitch's haircut. I am sorry not sorry for this very Midwestern mess of kissing and angst, in which everybody is definitely 18.
> 
> Thanks to betas [Mildly_Maddy](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Mildly_Maddy) and [thegracelane](http://thegracelane.tumblr.com/). Thanks to the [anon](http://ferryboatpeak.tumblr.com/post/163907154553/i-thought-it-was-mitch-too-it-reminds-me-of-that) who pointed out that Mitch got his high school hair back, and to [harryshippudge](http://archiveofourown.org/users/yeahloads) for asking the right follow-up question ("Is Mitch older? Does he go off to college first?"). Title from the Mitchell K. Rowland original tune [Reach](https://mitchellrowland.bandcamp.com/).
> 
> For god's sake please don't show this to anyone involved.

He overhears someone in the lounge talking about going home to the city for the weekend. That’s his direction, not the city itself, but a town with an interstate exit along the way. It wouldn’t be any trouble to drop him at the off-ramp truck stop on Friday, pick him up at the same place Sunday. Mitch offers up gas money and he’s got himself a ride home for the weekend, just that easy.

Seems meant to be, so he doesn’t waste any time thinking about whether it’s a good idea. 

He’s following his ride toward the parking lot after class on Friday, backpack on and duffle in his hand, when he sees Clare coming from the opposite direction. Clare from the suburbs, the one who convinced everyone from their floor to walk together to convocation and get ice cream afterwards, the one who organizes ultimate frisbee games on the lawn, the one who seems to be doing much more with the freshman experience than Mitch is. 

“Where’re you going?” Clare chirps.

The word “home” suddenly seems embarrassing. “Seeing my boyfriend,” Mitch says, instead.

“Oh, where’s he in school?” Clare asks, easily, no raised eyebrows or tripping over the pronoun, and Mitch feels a flash of gratitude for Clare, for college.

“He’s a year behind,” Mitch says, with “high school” sticking in his throat just like “home” did.

“Too bad,” Clare calls back at him, as she heads up the steps into the dorm and Mitch walks backwards toward the parking lot.  “We were getting people together for laser tag tonight.”

For a moment, Mitch wants to follow her. It would be just that easy, wave off his ride and make it to the elevator before the door closes behind Clare. Leave his duffle on his bed and follow her and the rest of their coalescing group of friends to the dining hall. “Next time,” he says, instead, and turns toward the car to toss his bag into the waiting trunk.

The long stretch of interstate is familiar from thousands of childhood drives; to field trips and to his grandparents’ house and to camp and to band competitions. Miles and miles of cornfields and silos and green highway signs. Nothing distinct about it except for one dip in the highway, under a railroad overpass next to a grain elevator. Mitch feels a corresponding dip in his stomach, like he does every time, since last fall. Almost a year now, he realizes.

He relaxes into the memory, wraps it around him like a blanket, lets himself run his fingers over every stitched-in detail. The grooved wood of the Best Percussion trophy the drumline passed hand over hand to the back of the bus on the way home from the invitational. Positioning it in the aisle to catch the faint beam of the headlights from the next yellow bus in line, while they celebrated loud and reckless in the dark. Then the scattered glow of one screen after another as everyone settled down one by one with their headphones on.

He and Harry were crowded together in the last seat, backpacks and hat boxes underneath their feet, garment bags hooked precariously on the window latch. They’d ignored the settling quiet, drumming back and forth on the seat on front of them, faster and faster until the rhythm collapsed in on itself and Harry made a grab for Mitch’s sticks.

Mitch fought back, holding his sticks above his head as Harry tackled him into the side of the bus. With Harry on top of him, all pointy knees and jabbing hands, he slid halfway down the seat against the slick nylon of the garment bags rustling behind him. Harry reached for the sticks and Mitch tried to elbow him away, their faces close enough for Mitch to smell Red Vines on Harry’s hot breath. 

He doesn't remember the moment in the struggle when Harry’s hand settled on him, only the recognition that it was  _ there _ , flat and warm against the skin where Mitch’s shirt had ridden up, halfway under the hem. It felt like it might melt him, sear straight through the bones where the curve of his ribcage fit into the dip between Harry’s thumb and index finger. Maybe it already had and that’s why he felt it clear down to his spine.

Harry’s expression was unreadable in the dim cavern of their seat. Mitch stilled, and took a breath, and then the moment when he could have yelped and kneed Harry in the stomach and made it all part of the wrestling match was gone. 

Over Harry’s shoulder, Mitch could see the dim outlines of Bird and his colorguard girlfriend curled up in the seat across the aisle with their eyes closed and headphones on. The diesel drone of the bus muffled every sound except the crescendo of Mitch’s pulse, so urgent it seemed audible. Another breath, and Harry’s hand was still there, electric and precarious with the need for Mitch to  _ do something  _ if he didn’t want the moment to vanish by the side of the passing highway.

Darkness streaked through the bus as the railroad tracks passed by overhead. Mitch let his arm fall, still gripping his sticks, until his forearm settled on top of Harry’s, pinning his hand in place. The fine hairs on the back of Harry’s arm stood up against the thin skin of his own wrist. Goosebumps, Mitch realized.

Harry sighed and sank down with his head on Mitch’s shoulder, knees tucked up next to him on the seat, a warm weight all along Mitch’s side, unexpected and tender. It left Mitch at a strange angle, with one shoulder pressed against the wall below the window and his other arm caught underneath Harry. He braced his knees against the back of the seat in front of him and made up his mind to never move, ever.

Harry was motionless too, except for the side of his thumb slowly and faintly tracing over the same small spot on Mitch’s stomach. It was almost imperceptible, just enough for Mitch to go shivery and stupid with how good it felt to be touched, how good it felt to be touched by Harry.

Mitch’s arm was falling asleep, but he waited until it was almost completely numb before he risked awkwardly wriggling it out from underneath Harry, half expecting that the disturbance would dissolve everything. Harry stayed stubbornly in place, and Mitch exhaled. He cautiously wrapped his freed arm around Harry’s waist and looked over again at Bird and Violetta across the aisle, realizing that their position mirrored his and Harry’s.

Maybe Harry slept, although it didn’t seem like it. Mitch didn’t. He spent the next hour reconstructing the last two-plus years, every band camp water fight, every Taco Bell run, every time Harry jokingly flung himself into Mitch’s lap.

Harry the goofy freshman the seniors put on the cymbal line because they were sure he’d trip over his own feet if they put a bass drum on him. Harry the sophomore, bumming rides home once Mitch got his license, until he became a permanent fixture in Mitch’s passenger seat. Until it was understood that he’d leave school with Mitch every day, even when football season was over, usually after hanging out in the band room for an hour with a pair of snares between them, messing around with cadences and trying out stupid drumline tricks. Harry as a junior, establishing himself as the right-hand man when Mitch became section leader, always coming up with the right joke to break the tension, the right trick to keep the underclassmen motivated. Mitch turned the puzzle pieces over and looked at them from new angles until they rearranged themselves into something different, something bigger than the sum of its parts.

When the bus slowed at the end of the off-ramp into town, Harry shifted onto his back and wound up with his feet in the aisle and his head in Mitch’s lap, not for the first time but feeling entirely different. Mitch followed him off the bus in a daze. He could still feel Harry’s phantom warmth against his side, still smell the sweat and vanilla of his hair. The school parking lot looked different, or felt different, the security lights glowing hectically and autumn leaves scraping too loud across the pavement. They drove to Harry’s in a crackling silence. When Harry kissed him, quick and awkward before launching himself out the passenger door, it was a confirmation, a relief, but also an anticlimax. The planets had already realigned while the miles of interstate passed beneath them, with Mitch’s arm around Harry and curls brushing his cheek.

Mitch’s ride takes the same off-ramp. At the stoplight, he can already see his mom waiting behind the wheel of her Subaru outside the truck stop restaurant. “Hi, sweetheart,” she says when he climbs into the passenger seat, leaning over the console to give him an awkward one-armed hug and a kiss on the cheek. “I barely recognized you.”

“It’s been like a month,” he says, prickly without meaning to be. He fits into the front seat all wrong. He shouldn’t be so happy to see her.

“Well, the hair.” She looks at him appraisingly. “It looks good,” she says. “It hasn’t been that short since middle school.”

Mitch shrugs. “Yeah, well.”

She turns left out of the parking lot. “What’s Harry going to think?”

“He’s seen it.” Sort of. Over Facetime, at least, one of the few times they’d managed it after the school year started. They’d talked at least once a day the first week Mitch was on campus, the contact his only center of gravity. But now Harry’s at school or band practice all day and in the dorm in the evening there never seems to be any place to have a private conversation, and anyway Mitch also kind of hates Facetime. Hates staring at his own face in the corner of the screen, hates how the camera weirdly elongates Harry’s face and makes his skin look all wrong. He’d rather just have Harry’s deep slow voice in his ear, but the idea of a phone conversation somehow feels even weirder.

He’s allowed to hate Facetime, he thinks, since Harry is stubbornly opposed to WhatsApp and Snapchat and anything else that would make communication easier. Right after the haircut he’d sent Clare and Ryan and the others a snap of his severed ponytail, neatly rubberbanded and feeling heavier in his hand than it had on his head. It would have been easy to send it to Harry too, if Harry was on Snapchat. It seemed too momentous to text him a photo, or even to text him ( _ getting a haircut, cutting it all off _ ), like sending a postcard from a vacation that isn’t all that interesting. Instead Mitch just waited for the next incoming Facetime call, nervousness hitting him in the beat between thumbing open the call and Harry’s face moving on the screen.

“Hoooooly shit,” Harry’d said, and then -- after a long pause -- “Does it feel weird?” 

Mitch only realized later that Harry never said whether he liked it or not. Which was probably enough of an answer all by itself.

“Didn’t think we’d see you until Thanksgiving,” his mom says, carefully casual, timed between stoplights so her eyes are focused on the road ahead.

Mitch keeps his eyes forward as well. “I got a ride, so.”

“Everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine,” Mitch says, with an edge of annoyance. “It’s just the weekend.”

“Okay.” His mom lets it drop, makes a joke about not turning his room into a home office just yet. Mitch forces a smile.

He borrows her car that evening, parks it a few blocks from school. He can hear the band in the distance, the drums over everything, as he walks toward the stadium. Standing in line at the ticket booth for the first time ever, he looks for familiar faces around him.

Mitch realizes uncomfortably that the reason he’s looking is so that he can avoid them. If former teachers and classmates who never left don’t see him, they can’t conclude he doesn’t have anything better to do on a Friday that come home, come to a high school football game. He’s grateful for the haircut, hiding him in plain sight. Sort of the opposite of the way he used to hide behind his hair.

The bleachers start behind the school and slope down from there to the football field. Mitch stands at the top of the band’s empty section and leans on the railing to watch the pregame show. There are five people in the snare line this year, but he can pick Harry out anyway, even in uniform, even all the way across the field. Rolled shoulders and pigeon toes, never quite blending into the line. There’s static in Mitch’s stomach, impatience and fondness and nervousness all mixed up together.

The team runs out onto the field and Mitch realizes his fingers are unconsciously tapping against his elbows, echoing the snare part as the band plays the fight song. He makes fists instead.

After the national anthem, the band starts to file in to their section. Harry catches sight of Mitch while he’s still on the track, between the field and the stands, and points at him with his entire upper body, arms flung up like Mick Jagger. Mitch waves back as casually as possible, suppressing the big stupid smile that’s threatening to take over his face. It feels so good to see Harry that for a moment he forgets how weird everything else about being here feels.

Harry’s jokingly shoving at the freshman in the cymbal line, hurrying them along in front of him. When they reach their seats at the top of the stands, he unhooks his snare from his harness, leaves it at the end of the row, and doubles back to have a whispered exchange with Sarah, who’s section leader this year. Harry points a thumb over his shoulder at Mitch.

“Hi, Mitch!” Sarah waves up at him, and the rest of the line follows suit. Even the freshmen who don’t know who he is.

“Hey.” Mitch lifts his hand in a motionless wave, exposed.

Sarah and Harry go back to their conversation. She shakes her head no, and then she makes a futile grab at Harry as he scrambles over the upper rows of bleachers and ducks under the railing, looking behind him to make sure the band director’s back is turned.

He pops up next to Mitch and keeps going, grabbing Mitch’s hand along the way. “Sorry,” Mitch mouths over his shoulder at an exasperated Sarah as Harry tugs him into the crowd of spectators trying to find seats before kickoff.

Harry’s bent halfway over as he threads his way through the herd, trying to disappear despite his bright green and yellow uniform and the plume on top of his shako. He straightens up and slows down when they reach the concession stand at the end of the bleachers, safely out of the sightlines of the drum majors and the band director.

“Hi.” Harry smiles crookedly, finally eye to eye with Mitch.

The crowd is thinner at this end of the stadium. “Hi,” Mitch echoes. He shifts his hand, lacing his fingers more securely through Harry’s.

Harry bumps him with his shoulder. “C’mon, that way,” he says, and tips his head toward the fieldhouse.

There’s nobody else around the corner of the building. Harry crowds Mitch back against the brick wall, hands at his waist. “Hi,” he says again, nose to nose, and doesn’t wait for an answer before kissing Mitch with a month’s worth of urgency.

Mitch leans into it, opening his mouth to Harry’s familiar cinnamon gum taste and feeling the hooks from Harry’s drum harness digging into his hips. He tucks his fingers into the loop of braid on shoulder of Harry’s uniform and tugs him as close as he can. This is it, this is what he came home for, this is worth it.

The intermittent cheers from the stadium don’t interrupt them, but Harry flinches and pulls back when the band launches into the fight song. Touchdown.

His eyes cut toward the field. “I should probably...”

“Yeah, you should get back,” Mitch says, feeling like a bad influence even though Harry literally dragged him here. “See you after?”

“Wait for me, OK?” Harry kisses him once more and trots back toward the stands. Mitch slumps back against the building for a moment, feeling rough brick against the shorn back of his head, before heading the same direction at a more casual pace.

Harry’s mom waves at him from the section next to the band and pats the spot on the bleachers beside her and Harry’s stepdad. Caught, Mitch sits down. Mrs. Twist is dressed like every other band mom around her: a green and yellow sweatshirt and a photo button. (Harry in his band uniform, sticks held against his chest and an over-serious expression on his face.)

Mitch wonders briefly what happened to his mom’s button from last year, the one with a terrible photo of Mitch. It used to be stuck to the bulletin board in their kitchen, until Harry found it there and appropriated it. He kept it pinned to his backpack for a few days until Mitch’s mom noticed and reclaimed it. It was completely embarrassing and Mitch quietly loved it.

“Harry said you’d be home this weekend,” Mrs. Twist says, giving him a one-armed hug. “Glad we got a chance to see you.” She asks him about his classes and chats to him about the band season and Mitch is stuck there for the rest of the game, all of them cheering together for the halftime show.

After the game, he waits by the outside door to the band room, moving backward and forward indecisively as he tries to position himself close enough that Harry will see him and far enough away that nobody else will. Harry finally emerges in a hoodie, with his garment bag over his shoulder and his sweaty hair scraped back in a headband.

“You drive?” Harry asks, slinging an arm over Mitch’s shoulders.

Mitch resists the urge to turn and wrap his arms around Harry now that he’s not in his uniform, press up against him without layers of buttons and braid and harness between them. He settles for an arm around Harry’s waist. “Yeah, you riding with me?”

“Thought I might,” Harry says, grinning, as if there was any other possible outcome. It’s so easy, like sliding back into last year, ambling toward the car hip-checking each other.

The Subaru’s sitting alone on a side street, the rest of the football traffic already cleared out. Harry chucks his garment bag and overflowing backpack into the back seat. Mitch can’t remember what he’s waiting for. He pulls Harry in, slides his hands under Harry’s hoodie onto the soft skin at his sides, kisses him up against the car.

Harry hums and angles a knee between Mitch’s. Mitch presses his hips in closer, never close enough. The street is quiet around them. The night air feels like the absence of temperature, a pause in an effortless slide from summer into fall. Harry palms the back of Mitch’s head, his nails scritching into the clipped hair and sending sparks down Mitch’s spine.

Then Harry’s laughing. “Sorry, sorry.” He scrubs his knuckles against Mitch’s scalp, his short hair. “It’s just so weird.” He dips his head down and Mitch feels the graze of teeth, Harry’s tongue tracing a line behind his jaw and under his ear. “I feel like I never met your neck before,” he mumbles, the words muffled against Mitch’s skin. “Has it been here the whole time?”

Harry’s mouth on his neck and his hands sliding lower on Mitch’s back aren’t enough to keep Mitch from asking. “It’s okay, though?”

“Yeah,” Harry says, “of course it’s okay,” intermittently as he leaves a line of sharp-toothed kisses on the way to Mitch’s shoulder. “Looks better in person.” He hooks his finger into the neck of Mitch’s t-shirt, pulls it to the side so he can sink his teeth in. Mitch wants him to leave a mark, wants something to take back to campus on Sunday, to press his fingers against, to know it’s real.

“It’s all better in person,” Mitch says, stupidly, as Harry fumbles one-handed for the door and tugs him into the back seat by a beltloop. Mitch slaps the ceiling until he connects with the dome light switch, leaving only a stripe of streetlight over Harry’s face beneath him. Everything is knees and elbows in the wrong places and hands in the right ones. It’s graceless and urgent and over almost before Mitch can reassure himself that he hasn’t forgotten how Harry feels, hasn’t forgotten the shuddery breath Harry takes after he comes, hasn’t forgotten the desperate bliss of coming for Harry, with Harry.

“Well, I missed that,” Harry says, after, as they’re shifting around and arriving at the conclusion that there’s no good angle in the backseat.

“I missed your mouth,” Mitch says, meaning more than how impossibly good its warm slide feels around him. He means all of Harry’s wide mouth, how it quirks up at one corner when he smiles and how it moves like it has no relationship to the rest of his face and how he’s constantly touching it with his thumb and forefinger and how that makes Mitch want to sink his teeth into Harry’s lower lip every time.

“Later.” Harry smirks.

“What now, then?”

Harry gives him a strange look. “Mario’s?” he asks, like it’s a question with only one answer, an answer Mitch has stupidly forgotten.

Mitch hasn’t forgotten, exactly, it’s just that he thought he was past the expiration date on going to the pizza place where the staff brace themselves for the band’s informal but inevitable descent after every home game. Last year it would have gone without saying that they’d be at Mario’s.This year, Mitch remembers, it still goes without saying for Harry. He feels immediately bad for keeping Harry away. “Yeah, sure,” he says, like the answer’s easy.

Harry’s brow furrows. “Do you not want to go?”

“No, no, it’s fine.” Mitch pops open the console, hoping his mom still keeps hand wipes in there. “It’ll be good to see people.” He rummages through maps and fast food napkins, not looking at Harry, hoping his tone doesn’t betray how little he wants to be the random old guy.

“Just for a bit,” Harry says, getting it without making it awkward, a trick Mitch adores and envies. “We should go out to the lake, after.”

Harry leads him into Mario’s by the hand, and it’s not as awful as Mitch expected it to be. He’s still lingering in the glow of getting off in the backseat, and maybe he doesn’t belong here, but he belongs with Harry. They weave their way through haphazard islands of shoved-together tables to the big booth where most of the line has congregated. 

Sarah stands up to hug Mitch. “What are you doing here?” She asks the question like he’s a happy surprise instead of a confounding anachronism.

“Got a ride,” Mitch says. “Thought I’d come see the show.”

“Awwww, that’s so sweet.” Sarah tips her head to one side. “I almost didn’t recognize you.”

“Yeah, well.” Mitch slides into the booth next to her. Harry’s off on the far side of the table, blowing the paper wrapper off a straw at someone.

“Why’d you cut it off?”

Mitch shrugs. That’s the strange part, that he doesn’t have a real answer. “Why not.”

“I’m gonna miss braiding it.” Sarah had made Mitch’s hair her personal project his sophomore year, when it was just getting long enough to tie back. She swooped in with hairpins and somehow got it all shoved up under his shako every Friday and Saturday. Then it turned out that the cost of letting Sarah make him presentable into his uniform was submitting to her french braiding tyranny on the bus home.

Mitch is pretty sure he’d noticed at least two girls in the bass line. “You’re not the only girl anymore, braid each other’s hair.”

Sarah makes a dismissive noise. “That’s boring.”

“Hey, Mitch.” Gerry leans around Sarah and breaks into the conversation. “How bad was halftime?”

Mitch talks to the two of them and ignores the underclassmen all around. Sarah and Gerry are Harry’s classmates, the ones who are going to have their senior year together, and Mitch won’t be any part of it. He wonders what Harry’s year is going to look like. He can’t imagine his own senior year without Harry’s bad jokes, and Harry’s enthusiasm for every obscure artist Mitch played for him, and Harry’s ability to somehow make Mitch’s day better every time he folded his stupid legs into the passenger seat. What use is he to Harry, he wonders, three hours away and awkwardly crashing his senior year at Thanksgiving, Christmas, and spring break.

Eventually Harry squirms his way into the booth and onto Mitch’s lap, grabbing a square of pizza. Mitch wraps his arms around him and rests his cheek against the back of Harry’s shoulder.

“Well, you guys are as sickening as ever,” Sarah says cheerfully. “Long distance must suck.”

Harry’s mouth is full of pizza, so it falls to Mitch to answer. “Yeah, sucks,” he says, reflexively, and then part of him wonders if it really does. College is pretty good, all in all. If long distance sucked, wouldn’t he text more? Wouldn’t Harry get WhatsApp?

Harry turns halfway around. “You ready to go?”

Finally, finally. “You sure?” Mitch asks. Pizzas are still arriving. Nobody else is leaving. Harry deserves this, deserves senior year.

Harry clambers awkwardly out of the booth and gestures wide around the room. “I mean, I’ll see everybody at, like, 6 a.m. Let’s go.”

In the car, Harry messes with the radio, changing it from classic rock to the terrible country station. Mitch used to fight him about it, but tonight it’s comforting. It’s the soundtrack to last summer. Aimless nights driving the roads outside of town looking for something unquantifiable, eyes on the road while they talked about everything but Mitch leaving.

He parks outside the locked gate to the county park on the edge of town. By the light of their phones, they pick their way down the footpath to the lake. Their steps echo hollowly against the small dock by the boat launch.

At the end of the dock, they dangle their feet over the edge. Mitch breathes in the smell of the lake, weedy and clean. Orange light from the streetlamp in the empty parking lot filters through the trees.

“You’re gone all day tomorrow?” Even though he knows the answer, Mitch asks anyway.

“Yeah.” Harry kicks his heels against the dock. “Hey, you should come with. You could be pit crew.”

“No way.” Mitch is absolutely not going to haul equipment with the band dads, or sit in the stands with Harry’s mom critiquing the competition. “I’m sleeping late.”  _ Text me when you get back _ , he doesn’t say.

Harry asks some vague questions about college, and Mitch answers just as vaguely. College seems far away from this moment, with water lapping gently at the dock and the last of the cicadas rasping in the trees. But at the same time, it seems more real. His reality, at least. It seems impossible to describe it in a way that would be of any interest to Harry.

Harry’s looking at him intently. “It’s okay, right?”

“Yeah, it’s good.” And it is, it really is. It’s just that sometimes he feels like he’s floating through college in a bubble, bumping into other people but not quite touching.

Mitch lowers himself down onto his back, arms crossed and feet still hanging over the side of the dock. “I should have marched, probably.” It was stupid to think he ought to focus on his major. He’s not entirely sure he knows how to make friends, the real kind, without the camaraderie of band camp and bus trips and ugly shoes and fight songs. He doesn’t even know what the college fight song is.

Harry leans back on his hands and looks over his shoulder at him. “Is there anything else you can do? Like, find a band or something? 

“I don’t know, maybe.” Mitch stretches his arms behind his head. “I met this guy from my dorm. Ryan. He plays bass.”

“Guitar, bass, that’s good enough, right?”

“Sort of,” Mitch says. “It’s not that easy.”

“Why not?”

“We don’t have, like, your garage.” Harry’s house has a pointless three-car garage where Harry’s drums live on a threadbare rug in the third bay. They spent a good bit of time there last spring, Harry on drums and Mitch on guitar. Or both of them tangled up on the rug. “There’s wait lists to get assigned a practice room, and the ones that are first-come, first-served are always busy so you can never just, like, walk in.”

“That sucks.” Harry doesn’t try to offer a solution, which Mitch appreciates. “I’ve been playing some with Sarah and Adam.”

Mitch has no right to be jealous. He’s three hours away and it’s good for Harry to have something going on. It doesn’t mean Harry’s going to make out with Sarah or Adam. He pushes the feeling away. “Sarah’s drumming? So what are you doing?” Mitch had tried to teach Harry some guitar chords last year, but his efforts usually devolved into Mitch playing while Harry sprawled on the couch behind him with his head jammed against Mitch’s hip, thumbing through his phone. 

“Singing, little bit of guitar.” Harry smirks. “Adam’s on bass. We’re calling it White Eskimo.”

“For real?” Mitch doesn’t need to ask, he knows Harry’s serious because he’s laughing. If it was a joke he’d be delivering it with a straight face, daring Mitch to believe him. “That’s terrible.”

Harry shoves at his legs. “Like your band’s gonna come up with a better one.”

“At least we’ll come up with something that’s not, like, borderline racist.”

“Ooh, look who got woke at college,” Harry says, lazily, and hooks his ankle around Mitch’s over the side of the dock. He leans backward until they’re shoulder to shoulder, both looking up at the sprinkling of stars in the September sky.

For a few minutes, they’re quiet. Then Harry looks at Mitch out of the corner of his eye. “So when you were all, ‘I met a guy…” He pauses. “You can’t just, like, start a sentence that way.” 

“No.” Mitch says it vehemently. “No, not gonna happen.” 

Something about it feels like the wrong answer. But he can't think of a better one, or one he’s more certain is true. He rolls over and stubbornly kisses Harry, because there’s nothing else to say, and because nothing in life has ever felt this good.

On Saturday, Mitch sleeps late. He lets his mom make him fried eggs and hashbrowns when he wakes up, and he’s not sure whether it’s for his sake or her own. He works on a set of problems for his chem class; goes for a walk with his parents at the nature preserve. Cleans some junk out of the closet in his old room, old spiral notebooks and newspaper clippings and certificates for senior awards. The photos on his wall stay, band photos and prom pics, Harry in a floppy bow tie.

After he hauls the garbage bag to the garage, he checks his phone and sees two texts from Ryan.

_ bring your drums back if you can _

_ we got a practice room _

Mitch looks up at his drums, stacked neatly in their cases in the corner of his room, and asks  _ what??????? _

Ryan starts typing back immediately. 

_ my name came up on the wait list _

_ got the email today _

Mitch texts Ryan ( _ sick _ ) and then he texts his ride ( _ is there room in car for my drums? _ )

For the first time that weekend, he wonders what the dorm crowd is up to. Probably a movie in someone else’s room, eight or ten people jockeying over who gets space on the bed and who sits on the floor, nobody wanting to give up their spot to go down to the lobby to meet the pizza guy. Sitting on the couch in the family room couch halfway reading Things Fall Apart for his English class, he wishes he was there.

Around 10:30, he gives in and texts Harry:  _ you home? _ The band was on the other side of the state today, but maybe.

He’s still staring at the screen, hoping to see that Harry’s typing, when the Facetime call comes in. The screen’s practically dark when he opens it, Harry’s face lit only by the glow of his own phone.

“Hiiiii,” Harry says.

Mitch reorients himself so the lamp on the end table’s shining into the camera. “How’d it go?”

“Third,” Harry says, slightly more visible now. 

“To who?”

“You know.” Mitch does. The usual two suburban schools, one of them Clare’s high school. That’s a strange thing about college, catching a glimpse of a t-shirt in the hallway and realizing he knows an actual human person from a school he’d only thought of as a faceless competitor. Mitch tried to explain that to Clare late one night, but it was news to her that her high school had a very good marching band.

Harry lifts the phone higher to take advantage of the light. His outline becomes clearer against the vinyl of the bus seat behind him. “Hi, Sarah,” Mitch says.

Half of Sarah’s face pokes into the side of the screen. “How’d you know I was here?”

“Because Harry has pigtails.”

Harry looks pleased with himself. “Somebody’s got to have some hair around here.”

“Where are you at?”

“I have no idea?” Harry looks around, as if the answer’s inside the bus. “Someplace far? It’s only been like an hour.”

_ Let me know when you get home _ , Mitch almost says, but it doesn’t matter because Harry wouldn’t hear him over the singing from the next seat. “Today’s gonna be the day that they’re gonna throw it back to you…”

Mitch assumes it’s Gerry and Jake. Last year, Bird would have been singing right along with them. He wonders how Bird’s doing, wonders if he and Violetta are still together. Wonders if it’s easier when you’re in the same class, so no one’s really the person who leaves, and nobody’s left behind.

“I don't hear you singing, Conor,” Gerry warns ominously. The singalong gets louder as Conor, whoever he is, apparently gets on board.

“....don’t know…” -- Mitch catches bits and pieces of Harry over the song -- “....curfew.” Then Harry yelps as something or someone crashes between him and the phone, and the view pitches upwards and goes dark. 

Mitch doesn’t call back. It feels like he’d be interrupting. Harry doesn’t call, either, 

Mitch wakes up late Sunday morning when his phone buzzes with texts. There’s one message from his ride:

_ Leaving now, see you in 2 hrs. Drums ok. _

Two from Harry:

_ Just woke up _

_ breakfast? _

Mitch checks the time on the texts. The first one came in a half hour ago. And Harry’s texts just arrived, must have woken him up.

_ have to be at truck stop for ride _

_ drive me and eat there? _

Mitch is already out of bed shoving clothes into his duffle when Harry’s “ _ ok _ ” comes in, and Harry’s on the doorstep before too much longer, hugging his mom and helping carry Mitch’s drums out to the car.

Mitch’s mom ruffles Harry’s hair. “Come by sometime,” she tells him. “We miss having you around.”

“Sure,” Harry says, both of them knowing it won’t happen.

His mom hugs Mitch for a moment too long and then pulls back, hands on his elbows. “We’ll see you at Thanksgiving?” Mitch isn’t sure whether it’s a question or a warning.

The pavement at the truck stop is already baking in the late morning sun when Mitch and Harry walk past the pumps toward the restaurant. They order pancakes, kicking lightly at each other’s ankles under the table.

“So, Thanksgiving?” Harry says.

“Yeah.” Mitch won’t be back before then, he knows that for sure. “You should visit,” he says. It feels like something he ought to say, and yet it’s never occurred to him before. He tries to picture Harry meeting his friends, Harry in the dining hall, Harry angled together with him in his narrow dorm bed. He doesn't know whether to want it or not. Whether it’s a good idea.

“That’d be fun,” Harry says. Mitch wonders if he’s thinking the same thing. It’s a pointless question anyway; fall weekends are for football games and band competitions.

They linger in the booth after the check comes, watching out the window for Mitch’s ride. Mitch wants it to end. For the first time he regrets coming home, really regrets it, because now he’s stuck with this awkward drawn-out truck stop memory instead of the last time he saw Harry in August.

They’d stayed out until almost three in the morning, Mitch reckless with the knowledge that curfew didn’t matter anymore, that there was absolutely nothing his parents could do besides refuse to drop him off at campus in the morning, and they sure weren’t going to do that. The August night pressed in thickly around them as they sat side by side at the top of the playground slide in the little park halfway between their houses. It was easy to believe that as long as the night wasn’t over, nothing else was either.

Mitch can’t actually remember the last things they said, whether they put any goodbyes into words. Just remembers Harry’s arms around him, and then not, Harry’s hand in his as he backed slowly away, stretching the moment out, not letting go until there was no other option. 

Harry follows him out to the parking lot when his ride pulls in. Mitch hugs him, hard, chin on his shoulder and eyes closed. There’s no good way to say goodbye to Harry. Maybe there never will be. With Harry in his arms, it’s easy to ignore the suspicion that he’s going to have to do it anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> find me on [tumblr](http://ferryboatpeak.tumblr.com/) for all your niche shipping needs. the post for this fic is [here](http://ferryboatpeak.tumblr.com/post/164535060218/cant-help-but-be-out-of-reach-author).


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